Eternity
by Anisky
Summary: It's rather dark. What if Jesse was wrong-- he's not seventeen till the end of the world... but longer?


Title: Eternity  
Summary: What if Jesse was wrong? That he wouldn't live till the Earth ended... but lived past that?  
Rating: PG-13, mostly just for being dark  
Disclaimer: Jesse and Winnie and his family and anything else you recognize don't belong to me.  
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Hello. My name is... what's my name again? It's on the tip of my tongue. Jesse. Yes, that's it. Jesse Tuck.  
  
I've heard that name, or said it, almost every day for the past... I think it's been almost a million years. How is it that already I have trouble remembering it? Soon the memory of my name may slip into the depths of forever.   
  
I can't say my name. It's not possible. But for now, I can think it. Thinking is all I have.   
  
I've seen so much. More than most people can imagine. I've seen the rise and fall of so many societies; some great, some not. I used to laugh at all the mortal people. I used to say that they took so much for granted: growing, changing, dying. I took things for granted too. I didn't know it at the time.   
  
My family hated it, they despised it. I didn't-- at least, not at first. It probably had something to do with my age. I was the youngest, and it didn't matter how old I *really* was. My body, and most importantly my mind, stayed seventeen.   
  
At least-- that's the way it was at first. For the first five hundred years, I was fairly happy. Oh, there were bumps along the way. Including one name that I can remember better than my own.   
  
Winnie.   
  
How can I remember her name? I really don't know. I haven't heard it for almost a million years. I hadn't even broken 200 years when I met her. She was the first, and only, person to whom I'd ever revealed my true self. I tried to convince her to join me, to stay with me until the ends of the Earth.   
  
A million years is a lot of time. It's impossible for the human mind to grasp it. So many things happen in that amount of time, and I've lived through all of it. But still, the memory of her face prevails through it all. Now, when I look back, it's a good thing she didn't join me. But she was the only one I tried to convince to drink from the spring.   
Did I love her? Was there really a time before all that, when I remembered how to love? Probably. Do I love her now?  
  
After her, it was bulldozed over. Nobody could join me even if they'd wanted to.  
  
There were other brief stints. I'd meet a girl, we'd stay together for five, ten years, breaking off before she'd notice that I hadn't changed. Five or ten years, for someone who is immortal, is simply the blink of an eye. A heartbeat. I cried at first. After a while they all blended into the same person and it all became a monotony. What's the point, if I'd have to leave her anyway?   
  
Am I crazy? Probably. I know that I probably couldn't have gone this long, this way, alone, without going crazy. It doesn't feel that way, though. I thought that when you go crazy, you escape these feelings. But they're still here. I can't stop.   
  
When I was born, there was very little technology. It was just a bunch of cabins in the woods. I've seen computers rise, take over the world, so that you can have anything with the touch of a button and later, a blink or even a thought.  
  
I've seen that civilization fall with war, so that all the wisdoms and technology was forgotten and everyone was scrapping for food and water and life.  
  
It was the year 9025... or something like that. I was in the city when the first atomic bomb was dropped. I watched as all the people I knew, and all their children, were deformed by the radiation. The human race had become a strange breed of monsters. Five years later they started over again, with year zero AFC. AFC stood for After the Fall of Civilization.   
  
Through it all, I stayed the same. A seventeen year old human boy, admittedly with a less carefree attitude.  
  
I remember talking to Winnie all those many years ago. "I'm going to be seventeen until the end of the world," I told her with a smile. Well, as it turns out, I was wrong.   
  
There was a time in Earth's history when there were space ships. People blasted off into space, exploring other planets. We never did discover aliens.   
  
All that changed with the wars. Each time a society got great enough to send out those ships, it would fall again, and everything would be lost.   
  
So when the sun finally died out, we had no warning. They weren't advanced enough at that point.   
  
Our sun isn't big enough to go supernova, but it sill gave off quite an explosion as it became a white dwarf. A big enough explosion to blow the Earth into thousands of different pieces.  
  
But guess what? The world ended. I didn't.  
  
My family is probably floating out there somewhere, too. There's no way to get to them, and they're far, far away by now.   
  
At first I played with the idea of something happening. Crash on a planet, meet creatures. But that doesn't make sense, it couldn't happen. Anyway, at the speed the I'm going, I think it would take millions of years just to get to the nearest star. And I'm not going in the direction of the nearest star.  
  
There's no way to move in space. I'm moving in the direction that the Earth sent me off into, and unless there's something else to push against, that's the way I'm going forever. Stars are light years away from each other, so it's unlikely that I'll fall into one.   
  
Would it kill me? I don't know. Probably not. Would anything kill me? If a black hole sucks me in, would I become as thin as a strand of spaghetti and crushed? Would that kill me? Or would I just stay in place, alive but unable to move?   
  
They say that it only takes a few months of isolation to drive you crazy. I don't know how long it's been since the Earth was destroyed. Centuries? Hours? Years? Seconds? Am I crazy? Aren't I? I don't know. Will I be crazy in a million years? Has it *been* a million years?  
  
You can't speak in space. I don't need to breathe, it seems, but you need air to talk. I can think my name for now, but I can't say it. I'll never hear it again. I'll never hear anything.   
  
I'm just floating here, alone, in the darkness. Second after Second after Minute after Hour after Day... alone... dark... empty. Disrupted only by the spots of light of stars.  
  
Or what if I was sucked into the orbit of a star? Circling the same planet for ever. Watching the same planets, the same stars, just going around and around and around, with the same thoughts and the same memories and the same everything.   
  
In a few billion years the universe will probably end, collapse. What happens then? Will I finally end with the universe and discover what comes after this life? Or will I somehow survive that too, those billions of years waiting only to discover that now I'm floating in a multiverse?  
  
I'll just be floating there, alone, hanging here in the darkness forever. Seconds after Minutes after Years after Eons, all alone, in the silence of my own insanity, without even the stars for company. 


End file.
